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This past Monday I attended the Innovation to Drive Productivity in Postsecondary Education meeting sponsored by the The Department of Education that Paul Fain describes in his 10/2 IHE article. I'm writing this post in an effort to respond to some of the comments to Fain's article.

Last spring, in a conversation with my (former) neighbor, who also happens to be an accomplished late-career scientist with whom I work from time to time, he sympathized with the dilemma my husband and I were debating at the time: whether to move our family across the country (if you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know we decided to move, which is why I identify my neighbor as “former”). “Big life decisions are the bane of my existence,” was the way he put it. I could have hugged him. Big decisions are difficult, draining. Having someone recognize this as I was going through it - especially someone who has done well in his own life - was a tremendous comfort.

A guest blogger's eflections on the recent EAIE meeting in Dublin: Europe, as we all know, has been and continues to go through a fascinating yet difficult process of higher education reform, made increasingly complex by the Euro zone crisis and the shaky overall global financial outlook. There is active, fundamental reconsideration underway of the central purposes of higher education, for example the extent to which labor force cultivation and innovation specifically to drive the knowledge economy should stand as primary goals, at the expense of time and resources devoted to more humanistic aspects of students’ personal, civic and intellectual development. In tandem, deep discussion in Europe currently centers on how best to achieve the many objectives that have been laid at the feet of the postsecondary sector by governments, industry and society at large.

A new correspondent writes: "I wondered if I could crowdsource a request for advice from a colleague trying to find a full-time academic job. She finished her PhD a little while ago and has strong references from two prominent faculty members at her graduate institution. For 6 years, she has been doing part-time teaching work at another university that has only two full-time faculty in her discipline: one she doesn't get along with at all (through no fault of her own), but the other is great and has written reference letters for her in the past. However, my colleague just saw one of these letters and it was all of two paragraphs long with nothing of substance to say."

I read Harvest Moon's beautiful essay "Quitting an Adjunct Career" with both sadness and a sense of familiarity. Like Harvest, I also trained as a sociologist, and have taught numerous sociology courses outside of the tenure track. Like Harvest, I also made the decision to not engage in anymore adjunct teaching - as the rewards for doing so have become inadequate to the opportunity costs inherent in the incredibly time and energy consuming task of teaching. And like Harvest, I also deeply miss the many joys of teaching.

Let me start by staying I do not aspire to perfection. (If you've ever seen my house you will know that this is a gross understatement.) So you would think I'd be in complete agreement with Barnard President Debora Spar, whose recent piece in Newsweek is titled, "Why Women Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect." Spar's piece is accessible, clear, and often grimly funny in the way people sharing parenting stories can be. She writes of delivering a lecture in a suit that smelled of baby vomit, of slipping out of meetings to attend piano recitals, of missing track meets when a deadline loomed. I get it: she's been there, she's juggled home and family, and she has the scars to prove it.

How do you bring visuals into your classroom?

Why do people continue to apply to, and attend, nothing-special doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences?